Seward Range & Seymour Backpacking Trip

 



"A friend is someone who makes it easy to believe in yourself."

Oh, the dreaded Seward Range we had heard so much about. Laura and I had planned a long weekend and decided lets go for this Range. We decided it would be best done in a backpacking trip. On my birthday we last minute invited Mik along, she got the days off and tagged along for her first overnight trip and first time hiking in the Adirondacks.

We hoped we wouldn't break her. :)

We all met at Lauras house on Friday evening to take off early Friday for our 6 hour drive over. We would arrive at the trailhead around noon. We then threw our heavy ass packs on and hit the trail for camp. We hiked in just under 2 miles to the designated camp where we would share the space with others who were already there. At least, for our first night in the wilderness.


We set up camp, ate a snack, put all of our food in our bear canister and hit the trail with our trail running vests for Seymour. We brought our headlamps as we got a 3:00pm start and we did finish in the dark. 

Seymour, you little bitch you. This peak. Just wow. It was a very long flat walk to the base of the climb, then it was quite the vertical gain to get to this summit. It felt honestly, never ending toward the last .2 of a mile. So many ledgy scrambles. That were also wet and a little icy at this point. We all agreed that we wanted to be at least down and off those slabs before dark hit.






We finally summited and some gorgeous views of the High Peaks from here. On our way back down we stopped at the West facing lookout and started to see sun setting which was absolutely gorgeous!

We hit the trail back down and hiked back to camp arriving around 9:00pm. We at dinner, away from camp to prevent bears and so we did not wake the others camping. Went to bed for what was going to be a much longer day with 3 more summits.

I was the first to wake the next morning, I crawled out of the tent as soon as I heard the other campers pack up and leave for the weekend. It was Sunday so it was a given we wouldn't be seeing many people that day.

We had breakfast and coffee and hit the trail around 9:00am. We were off to experience this so called "dreaded" mountain rage.


We hit the trail junction for the heard path up to Donaldson. It was a beautiful Cairn of trash. Well, really historic artifacts, not really trash. However, I aptly named both the trail and cairn "trash paths" & "trash cairns."





We started up taking our time, chit chatting the entire way. Finally making it to the junction we decided to go for Donaldson & Emmons first. Donaldson out of the two had some good views. Emmons was on this tiny rock that barely fit the three of us on top of. We quickly left this summit and headed out back towards Donaldson and then over to our final peak of Seward.

At the junction Seward look very far off in the distance and certainly steep. Tired as much as we all were we continued to push on. Finally making it to our last summit. We met three sweet ladies along our trek that day who followed us over there and back. They were kind enough to take our photo and then we soon pushed on back to camp.



We arrived back at camp around 7:30pm. We made our dinners and started a fire. I brought Cheese and Salami as an app and Laura brought the wine! We enjoyed the rest of our night at camp chilling by a fire and chatting about life and these unbelievable mountains!

Next morning we woke early, packed up and hit the trail the 2 miles back to the car. We had to ensure we stopped for a very large breakfast in Saranac Lake before continuing our long drive back home.

Overall, it was a very chilly weekend, but absolutely gorgeous! 

Seward Range, not my favorite but certainly challenging.






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